Three minutes. That is how long Jontay Porter stayed in a game that, per prosecutors, would have paid one bettor about $1.1 million, and now the league is pulling the bet that made it possible. The NBA has told sportsbooks to stop taking some of the wagers at the center of its gambling scandals, a new NBA sportsbook bet ban detailed in a league memo, first reported by ESPN.
The memo went to the league’s sportsbook partners on Friday, according to TSN’s account of the ESPN report. It lays out which wagers are off the board this season. DraftKings and FanDuel are among the operators affected, and the new NBA sportsbook restrictions apply across the league’s partner books.
What the NBA sportsbook bet ban covers
The biggest change hits parlays. Bettors can no longer stack the under on several stats for the same player in one parlay. In the memo’s words, these are “low likelihood, high payout bets.”
Three more bet types are gone, per the memo as reported:
- Bets on who wins the opening tip
- Bets on players to miss specific shots
- Under bets on players expected to play fewer than 12 minutes
Sportsbooks also can’t offer alternate lines on unders that carry bigger payouts. Translation: the league went after the long shots that pay the most.
Why the NBA parlay ban targets these bets now
The answer comes straight out of federal court. Same-player under parlays showed up in the cases involving Jontay Porter and Terry Rozier, so this NBA parlay ban follows the evidence.
Prosecutors said one bettor put $80,000 on a parlay of Porter’s unders in assists, rebounds, points, 3-pointers, steals and blocks. The game was Raptors vs. Kings in March 2024. The parlay would have paid about $1.1 million. Porter left after three minutes.
Porter admitted in court that he removed himself from games early to benefit bettors. At the time, he was on a two-way contract with Toronto in 2023-24.
Prosecutors also allege bettors used similar parlays on Rozier’s stats in a March 2023 Hornets-Pelicans game. Rozier, then with Charlotte, left after about nine minutes. He has pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.
NBA executive vice president Scott Kaufman-Ross said those cases were factors in the decision. The pattern is hard to miss: a player who exits early turns a stack of unders into a jackpot. Michael Jordan’s Game 2 jersey fetched a fortune without a single bid, as our look at the $14 million Jordan jersey sale shows, but in this case the money was moving the wrong way.
The catch: this NBA betting ban could push bettors underground
Here’s the thing. If you bet on the NBA, your menu just got shorter, and the league is betting you won’t take your appetite somewhere shady.
“There’s a balance between ensuring that we are removing problematic bet types but also ensuring that we don’t just move activity into the illegal market,” Kaufman-Ross said. He added that the league thinks it has landed on “the right balance of those two objectives.”
That worry has teeth. The league says its partner books account for upward of 99% of the U.S. betting market, so it can shape what most bettors see through its agreements. Even so, if legal books get too restrictive, some bettors will simply go elsewhere.
What happens next
The restrictions apply this NBA season. So far, reporting doesn’t spell out an exact start date, an enforcement mechanism or penalties for books that don’t comply. Nobody has seen the memo itself either. The details come through ESPN’s reporting, and neither DraftKings nor FanDuel has commented yet.
Meanwhile, Rozier’s federal case is still ongoing. For the league, this is damage control with a deadline: the season tips off soon, and fans will notice which markets vanished. Stars like Fever guard Kelsey Mitchell draw plenty of betting interest on the women’s side too, so the whole sports-betting world is watching how these limits play out.
The big question now: is pulling the most abusable bets enough, or does the next scandal just find a new angle?
